Western Digital has announced its fastest My Book external hard drive ever produced. The new drive is called the My Book VelociRaptor Duo and uses a pair of 10,000 RPM 1 TB hard drives combined with Thunderbolt technology. The combination of Thunderbolt and 10,000 RPM hard drives gives incredible speed for data access and incredible speed for connectivity between the drive and the computer.

The 2TB external solution includes a pair of Thunderbolt ports and Western Digital says that the high-capacity and fast drive is ideal for editing high-resolution video, 3-D rendering, graphic design, and other performance demanding digital media applications. The dual disc external hard drive provides data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s.

The drive supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 for performance or data protection. The dual Thunderbolt ports allow the user to daisy chain multiple VelociRaptor Duo drives or other high-performance peripherals without affecting performance.

"The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is the fastest and most reliable high performance consumer storage device on the market today," explains Jody Bradshaw, senior director of WD's consumer storage solutions group. "Creative professionals now have access to a super-charged storage drive that will keep pace with even the most demanding projects. Daisy-chaining multiple My Book VelociRaptor Duo devices together offers even greater speed, more capacity and flexibility."

The drive also supports JBOD option for users are running Windows on a Mac computer. The drive comes out-of-the-box ready for work with Apple Time Machine and is HFS+ Journaled for Mac computers.

The drive is available in select retailers and online now for $899.99.

I've priced out what 2TB of SSD storage, with a near equal interface to Thunderbolt, would run. For the drives, it would be either 2 512GB SSDs at $400 each, (or alternatively 8 256GB drives at $200 each, but the enclosure would be more expensive) an external SAS controller (LSI/3ware 9750-8e) at $800, and an external 4 bay SAS enclosure with 2 SFF-8088 cables at $300. Total that up and you get $2700. Sure, it's a lot faster bandwidth (around 1200MB/s, faster than Thunderbolt can handle) and seek times, but at 3 times the cost.

Actually, I'm almost drooling looking at this stuff. I might actually go for something like this next year, if I can get a better job to pay for it.

What benefit does paying so much extra to have a faster external drive give you? IF its to have it as a bootable drive for multiple OS's that is cool if you need it, but you would be an extremely rare customer.

You were the one who mentioned SSDs being so superior to the drive in this article. I'm just making it clear to you just what you're suggesting. Yes, they're superior, but in order to get that superiority, you have to pay for it. That's just keeping the storage size the same.

The fact of the matter is that each type of drive, from 5400 and 7200rpm consumer drives to 10k and 15k rpm professional level drives to SSDs, have their places. SSDs are great for OS and program storage. At one point, they would have been great for just single apps, but too expensive and too unreliable for the OS. Things change. Slower, standard drives are good for data storage. A day may come when SSDs would be best for all storage. We aren't there yet.

I have a total of 4 SSDs in my main machine, one for the OS and office apps, one for games, one specifically for the WoW beta, and one specifically for WoW. I also have 3 regular hard drives: two 2TB drives in a mirror for data storage and one 3TB drive for nightly backups. I swapped the hard drive in my laptop with an SSD, but I still keep the 640GB 5400rpm drive it came with in a USB3 enclosure for data storage ont he go. It is good to keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses of things so you know when to use them, and adjust your habits when those strengths and weaknesses change. Don't just throw things away when new technology or new ideas come along. There is still value in older technology and ideas if they are used right.